champorado

What is a liminal space?

When speaking about liminal space, as a photography medium more than anything, I think the first thing you’ll find is a sort of blank slate feeling. A feeling of like, spaces that are just specific enough to really point in the direction of like, “Oh, I have something to latch onto here.” But also very, very ambiguous, where there’s no actual human presence to be found that you’re going to sort of, you know, feel…I guess alienated by.

– Kane Parsons, How 14 Year-Old Kane Parsons’ Blender Hobby Turned into a Hollywood Movie

You say we’re on the brink of destruction and you’re right. But it’s only on the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve. This is our moment. Don’t take it from us, we are close to an answer.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the loved person. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

– Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Libraries, video rental places, and used book stores (none of which pay the artist) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?

– Aaron Swartz

It is a vertiginous thing to have so much freedom—to be always self-skeptical, always testing the reasons for your beliefs, always prepared to abandon them for something better. If you can do anything you want, then every day becomes an existential problem—an empty space of possibility that has no ceiling but also no walls and no floor.

To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered. To consider the world from first principles, to think about how well it would work if everything were different, is to be ready to throw away everything you know. Radical idealism and a sense of limitless possibility are the brighter facets of absolute rejection.

– Larissa MacFarquhar, American Chronicles, “Requiem for a Dream”

So then, when you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence, because that’s not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they’re going to be locked up in a dark room forever, and sort of undergo that. But one of the interesting things in the world is–-this is a yoga, this is a realization–-try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about it.

It’s one of the great wonders of life. What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out, among other things, it will pose the next question to you. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born.

You see, you can’t have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum. So after you’re dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience as when you were born.

– Alan Watts